Asheville radio listeners got a new station last week that plays 80’s music — and they’ll get a kick-off month-long stream of music uninterrupted by commercials.
REWIND 100.3 FM is owned by the Asheville Radio Group. The station focus is “Fun, upbeat music,” which means mostly 80’s, bracketed by touches of 70’s and 90’s. Target audience is the “active female consumer.”
As a launch promo, REWIND 100.3 is playing 10,000 songs (“Songs of Summer”) without commercials, the latest terrestrial gambit to compete with the generally lower ad loads of Internet radio. It will take 27 days to get through that massive playlist, so Asheville listeners can rely on commercial-free listening until mid-July.
This is nothing new. First I heard of it was when KUDD/Roy-Salt Lake City did it in the late 1990s. A number of stations have done it since, mostly decades formats or top-40s, occasionally other formats.
One showed up here recently, about two years ago, that ran commercial-free for months. KUTC/Ephraim-Provo signed on October 1, 2013 and I didn’t hear a commercial for months. This was an LMA of a station owned by a rural broadcaster who decided to rimshot the nearly half-million people he could reach with that signal out of the 600k in the Utah County area. ‘Sky-FM’ as it’s known,is an adult-top-40.